Dessins d'enfants and Hubbard Trees

Abstract

We show that the absolute Galois group acts faithfully on the set of Hubbard trees. Hubbard trees are finite planar trees, equipped with self-maps, which classify postcritically finite polynomials as holomorphic dynamical systems on the complex plane. We establish an explicit relationship between certain Hubbard trees and the trees known as ``dessins d'enfant'' introduced by Grothendieck.